may to april 2012

May 29th

Syria: UK government money and training to fighters.

May 19th

Popular film racism 1940 - 2012

May 15th

Much publicity in Western media has been given this past couple of days to a report from American funded Human Rights Watch which asks Nato to take responsibility for a whole 72 civilian deaths as a result of its Libyan campaign last year. Phew! Naturally, the response has been “Is that all? What’s the fuss about?”

What indeed. New York based HRW has increasingly since the Israei flattening of the centre of Jenin in 2002 acted as a kind of safety fuse which publishes “accusatory” exposés of western-Israeli-Nato military exploits accusing them of in fact risibly small amounts of killing. This journal on August 8th last cited hundreds of Libyan refugees dying on one occasion alone when a fleeing ship full of refugees from Nato bombing was allowed to founder whilst Nato ignored pleas for assistance. Russia Today reported two weeks ago the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed censure on Nato as responsible for 1500 Libyan refugees who lost their lives at sea whilst Nato ships and planes ignored them.

Those inland not amongst the 70,000 refugees camped on the border with Tunisia could have to bear the onslaught of Nato’s 9,600 bombing raids and fusillades from offshore Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Of the latter 140 were launched on the first night alone of the eight month campaign.

Nato’s PR machine naturally dovetailed the HRW report into selfcongratulation about their supposed use of weapons “which avoid collateral damage”. The weapons are the Hellfire Missiles which do not explode outwards over an area, but concentrate an intense impact inferno within the building or vehicle on which they have fallen. This reduces all within to an unrecognisable mess. If “collateral damage” is taken to mean civilian deaths then any civilians within a vehicle or building hit by such missiles would be reduced to the same unrecognisable, and uncountable, mess as military personnel.

The Dresden-like ruins of Sirte would yield not much in the way of body count from such missiles. But the many other missiles that caused such ruins as the empty shell that became Sirte would alone make HRW’s figures preposterous. They are, to those with the time and the curiosity to go beyond the Guardian/corporate media presentations, patently just another salvo in the media war that now essentially includes nongovernmental agencies in its encompassing.

May 11th

May 9th

First Referendum Poster.

April 25th

The project of about twenty iron word-stamped panels around the new Eastgate building at Brook Street in Bridgeton Glasgow has been completed by the artist Stephen Skrynka.

The one above uses a design by Stephen containing the names of 29 women workers at the local Templeton’s factory who lost their lives when a new factory wall fell through the roof of the weaving mill in 1889.

The design above uses words by Frankie Miller whose favourite comedian apparently is Ken Dodd. Stephen Skrynka says that when the commissioning high heid yins saw this they were pleased that as they thought he had made a design illustrating the olympic torch for the forthcoming Commenwealth Games in the East End in 2014. Stephen pointed out it was meant to be Ken Dodd’s tickling stick.

This is one of my poems from Six Glasgow Poems of 1969. As the words on all the panels are cut out the iron, looking straight on you get a different seethrough effect from such as this, taken from an angle.

April 19th

Have been enjoying a website “Streets of Liverpool” which has page after page of photographs going back to the early twentieth century. Very atmospheric, much of it looking like Glasgow in similar periods, only with the peculiar freshness for me of it being in fact a different city from the one I live in: yet so much of the same architecture and street fittings, photographs with a real sense of urban place and ordinary working class people going about their lives; without, in the photographs, that awful “celebratory” middleclass undertone of a deal of touted Glasgow photography published in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

When looking at a 1910 photograph of two Liverpool girls I was reminded of Joan Eardley’s paintings of Glasgow children in the Townhead area. No patronising there. Here’s the Liverpool photo, and a Joan Eardley from the fifties: the latter children are shod, but still with neglect somewhere in there with the childlike trust.